Common Swifts by Bruno Liljefors

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Well Readers, actually not first swifts at all – I saw my first swifts on Friday 24th April, just before I left the UK for Toronto. What a joy they are, screaming between the houses against an azure sky. I’ve written about them before, and  am still waiting to see if anyone will show any interest at all in my swift nesting box. Quite possibly I should have put up half a dozen, as these birds are communal nesters, but the scaffold came down before I got my act together.

There is something about the return of the swift that is reassuring, even  though the birds are Red Listed in the UK, and their numbers have declined by 66% since the 1950s. Is it lack of insects, lack of nesting places, or even the way that the weather patterns in El Niño and La Niña years affect the places in Africa where the swifts over winter. It isn’t clear, but it is yet another thing to worry about. Still, in 2026 they’re here, and not only here, but early. And here is a poem by Anne Stevenson. See what you think.

Swifts

By Anne Stevenson

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, ‘The swifts are back!’

Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It’s the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.

The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.
But a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers
Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water’s forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.

Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,

So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.
And they stayed there. ‘Well,’ said the Raven, after years of this,
‘I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
On condition that you give up rest.’

‘Yes, yes,’ screamed the swifts, ‘We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!’

So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return

Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so
We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
Bolts in the world’s need: swift
Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply

Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world’s breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur,
And watch the miracle.

Swift Feeding by Johan Stenlund